The technique, which involves two drones working in tandem, could have a variety of applications, such as emergency search-and-rescue, archaeological discovery and structural monitoring.

Using Azure, gave them an immediate global reach in a way unthinkable just a few years earlier. Their mission is to bring big data analytics to utilities and smart cities, and one of their focus areas is electric utilities and smart grids. It is a story that combines drones with intelligent software to prevent power blackouts, or as eSmart puts it "making Azure intelligence mobile". To see Connected Drone in action, please watch this video. The economic impact of blackouts is massive, and the scale of power grids is huge.

A United States drone strike in Somalia killed one al-Shabab militant Saturday, U.S. military officials announced on Monday. The Department of Defense conducted the strike in southern Somalia in coordination with regional partners, and no civilian casualties were reported, officials said. "Al-Shabab has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and is dedicated to providing safe haven for terrorist attacks throughout the world. Al-Shabab has publicly committed to planning and conducting attacks against the U.S. and our allies," U.S. Africa Command said in statement to Fox News. A firefighter tries to extinguish fire after an attack on a restaurant by the militant group al Shabaab.

The Somalia-based al-Shabab earlier this month mocked Trump for the first time in a video that called him a "brainless billionaire." The extremist group also has vowed to step up attacks in Somalia after the president elected in February declared a new offensive against al-Shabab, which continues to carry out deadly attacks in the capital, Mogadishu.

FILE - In this file photo dated Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2014, Serbia's Stefan Mitrovic grabs a banner containing the Albanian flag attached to a drone flying above the pitch during the Euro 2016 Group I qualifying match between Serbia and Albania in Belgrade, Serbia. The banner prompted fan violence with the match was suspended, and a man who claims to have flown the drone has been detained but it is revealed Saturday July 29, 2017, that Albania's soccer federation is calling on Albanian authorities to stop his extradition to Serbia.

Tokyo-based venture ZMP Inc. may begin field testing a self-driving delivery robot in August intended as an alternative to aerial delivery drones as Japan grapples with a growing labor shortage. The box-shaped CarriRo Delivery robot, which is 133 cm long and 109 cm high, is designed to run on sidewalks and carry loads of up to 100 kg, ZMP said. "Our delivery robot is more suitable than drones when it comes to delivering heavy products like food items," said ZMP Chief Executive Officer Hisashi Taniguchi. The company has teamed up with sushi delivery firm Ride On Express Co. to test a prototype of the autonomous vehicle on private property. The robot, which is equipped with cameras and sensors and can steer itself at a maximum speed of 6 kph, selects delivery routes on its own using a pre-loaded map. It can be controlled remotely when needed, according to ZMP, which is also developing self-driving car technologies.

Any ammunition storage location, full of explosives collected in one place, makes a tempting target. For an attacker, the hard part is getting an explosive inside the perimeter to set it off. Drones are the ideal mechanism for this mayhem. Relatively cheap and expendable, a drone's major limitation is how much weight it can carry. In this case, the aerial vehicle seems to have transported a Russian-made ZMG-1 thermite grenade.

Amazon's futuristic fleet of autonomous delivery drones could be equipped with data grabbing sensors, according to a patent granted to the firm. This would allow the vehicles to scan your home at the same time as dropping off your package. The company believes this may reveal clues that could allow it recommend products for you to purchase. Some may feel uncomfortable at the prospect of arming the self-flying devices with such snooping technology, although the patent suggests it would be opt-in service. Amazon's futuristic fleet of autonomous delivery drones could be equipped with data grabbing sensors, according to a patent (pictured) granted to the firm.

The U.S. Navy is testing tiny robot drones that fly in swarms like cicadas to collect data. The CICADs - or'close-in covert autonomous disposable aircrafts - are designed to be cheap enough that a bunch can be dropped simultaneously from the sky and even into storm conditions like hurricanes. The Naval Research Lab has been working on the technology in various ways since 2011, but the focus of this specific iteration - MK5 - is a shape that would allow them to be stackable. The stackable robots disperse to their own GPS coordinates to collect data. Currently, 32 can be released at once. Once landed, they send the data back to the aircraft they were dropped from.

Over the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), also known as drones, have been adopted as part of a new logistic method in the commercial sector called "last-mile delivery". In this novel approach, they are deployed alongside trucks to deliver goods to customers to improve the quality of service and reduce the transportation cost. This approach gives rise to a new variant of the traveling salesman problem (TSP), called TSP with drone (TSP-D). A variant of this problem that aims to minimize the time at which truck and drone finish the service (or, in other words, to maximize the quality of service) was studied in the work of Murray and Chu (2015). In contrast, this paper considers a new variant of TSP-D in which the objective is to minimize operational costs including total transportation cost and one created by waste time a vehicle has to wait for the other. The problem is first formulated mathematically. Then, two algorithms are proposed for the solution. The first algorithm (TSP-LS) was adapted from the approach proposed by Murray and Chu (2015), in which an optimal TSP solution is converted to a feasible TSP-D solution by local searches. The second algorithm, a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP), is based on a new split procedure that optimally splits any TSP tour into a TSP-D solution. After a TSP-D solution has been generated, it is then improved through local search operators. Numerical results obtained on various instances of both objective functions with different sizes and characteristics are presented. The results show that GRASP outperforms TSP-LS in terms of solution quality under an acceptable running time.